Table 3 Perceptions related to diet and overweight and obesity in Galapagos

A. Dietary quality

 A lot of sugar; a lot of salt; a lot is fried. Everything is unhealthy these days. (Adult female)

 (In the school cafeteria), la food isn’t completely health as it should be. There is food with fat, those sorts of things. Also, I like sweets and I always eat them. So it’s not as health a diet as it should be. (Adolescent 16-18, female).

 I think that what my mother gives me is health because she gives me vegetables and all those things, like soup. (Boy, 8-12)

 It’s just that rice should never be lacking in the house, I think. . . . Pasta with rice, fried pork with rice, corn. (Adult female)

 The soups have a lot of fat, and the rice also has some more fat, and no restaurant that we’ve gone to serves a salad. (Adult female)

 There was rice there; I reheated some rice and I bought a pack of four hot dogs: big ones, I’d say. Without thinking—I don’t know how to economize—I took them and I said, today I’m going to eat well. So four hot dogs: two for (my daughter) and two for me. (Adult female)

 I really don’t know much about what a healthy diet is. . . . I try to vary (the food) but exactly how to do that, I have no idea. (Adult female)

 One knows what to do, but not how to eat [healthy]. (Adult male)

 During this year that I´ve been able to be at home, I’ve been trying to go back to natural [foods] and trying to get rid of [unhealthy food]. (Adult female)

 For example, when they bring tomatoes from the highlands, they come in trucks. How do they come? How many days does it take those trucks to get to the dock, which is the shipping point in Guayaquil, and until it is loaded? (Adult female)

B. Daily diet

 I don’t buy snacks in the cafeteria. When I leave school, I buy little pastries that cost 25 cents and in the middle of the afternoon, I buy a fried plantain ball or ice cream. (Boy, 8-12 years)

 My diet is healthy because even though I eat junk food, which you can understand from the labels, like potato chips. I also practice sports and I burn calories. (Girl, 8-12 years)

C. Factors in purchasing food for home consumption

 Recently I started growing tomatoes, green peppers, and things like that. (Adult female)

 I have two papaya trees in my yard, so when my children want papaya, I can use those. (Adult female)

 We can´t grow much in the highlands. We have only family agriculture because the worms eat everything, and it’s dry. We can’t use fungicides or insecticides because they are prohibited in Galapagos. But the water is in heavy demand; worse now in the dry season, and it’s almost impossible to carry water (for) the plants. (Adult female)

 In reality, we know that we should eat vegetables and fruit, but you could say that it’s a luxury. (Adult female)

 Many people here don’t have a balanced diet because of the cost and salaries. One cannot buy what one wants because food goes through a process in order to arrive here, so the price increases. To buy fruit, it costs you double what it costs elsewhere and sometimes it is not within peoples’ budgets. (Adolescent, 12-17, female)

 If you need something specific, you have to look for it throughout the island, and sometimes you can’t find it anywhere (Adolescent, 12-17, female).

 (When buying produce, you have to look at) the price, expiration date, and if it is clean. (Girl, 8-12).

 My mother and father (buy food); I always stay home When I do go, I get my cookies or something like that, but I have to look at the price, in the nutritional label, the quality, and when it expires because sometimes food stays on the shelf and if we don’t use it right away, we have to throw it away (Girl, 8-12)

 There are times that something happens to the ship and you don’t find (produce) for a week or two weeks. (Adult female)

 It’s also how the vegetables get here. For example, the plantains come in those containers and also other fruit. But when they open (the containers) the rats and all those animals come out, and that’s what we eat. (Adult female)

 It’s enough that there is red. For example, I taught this to my daughter because when we shop, she always wants to grab something without looking and I say that there is red, so no. (Adult female)

 I see that it’s high in sugar if it’s red. (Girl 8-12)

 We bought a big package last Christmas and we only finished it two weeks ago. (Adult male)

 I look at the labels of processed meat and we don’t buy very much. (Adult male)